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Monday, February 24, 2014

8 Years Backreaction!

Thanks to all my readers, the new ones and the regulars, the occasionals and the lurkers, and most of all our commenters: Without you this blog wouldn't be what it is. I have learned a lot from you, laughed about your witty remarks, and I appreciate your feedback. Thanks for being around and enriching my life by sharing your thoughts.

If you have a research result to share that you think may be interesting to readers of this blog, you can send me a note, email is hossi at nordita dot org. I don't always have time to reply, but I do read and consider all submissions.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts through this blog. for me, the only blog that I am following for so long now – at least five years if not more. With non science background, I don’t understand some of your posts, but enjoy reading others. Love the clarity in your communication style, many of your ideas and arguments and of course, rarely also find myself not quite agreeing but never managed to comment out here. least I can do however is, thank you for sharing your ideas as this blog completes a good eight years.

Bee, Thank you for making a clear signal of your free-ranging insight and curiosity while also sharing a delightful bit of the human side of being physicist. Thanks also for tolerating some noise in the channel.

In searching for metaphor here, I Googled “cargo cult” and came across Feynman’s speech of 1974:

“In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.”

And still, adding a bit of noise to a weak signal may push it above the threshold of detection.

Mine will soon be 10 though while I do still update, its been on an irregular basis the past four years. I just found that I had hit a wall where even though I had done the research, gotten data or whatever, by the time I was ready to write the entry I just no longer had the desire to put it to paper.

That you have continued in a very active way to write often very detailed and complex entries really is a testament to your dedication to physics outreach. If they had a Nobel for this you would most certainly be nominated!